Welcome to this week's edition of Mississippi Happenings podcast.
My name is David Olds and I'm joined with my co-host, Jim Newman from Tupelo.
Jim, how are you buddy?
Hey, I'm getting a lot better.
And hello Mississippi.
oh Or if you, perfect, good, that's way we like you.
Or as Roger Wicker said today in Mississippi Today, he told Mississippians to get a life.
So we know how.
to say when he's got the best retirement benefits, the best healthcare benefits.
Yeah, I guess he could say things like that.
And he's doing pretty much everything that Trump tells him to do, correct?
Got it.
All right.
As you all know, our regular subscribers that we do appreciate, we talk a lot about Mississippi and what's happening in Mississippi and what happens across the nation that
affects us all.
ah This is about Mississippi kitchen table issues.
ah We wanna go back a little bit uh and look at history.
And it appears in talking to other Democrats and other progressives with the elimination of DEI, which is diversity, equity, and inclusion, it appears that we're going back to
segregation.
ah I know that's my fear and that's a fear of lot of my friends and associates.
Today joining us
is Larry Rubin.
Larry Rubin has a rich history in segregation, desegregation in the 60s.
Larry was a SNCC, is SNCC, which is Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
oh He was an organizer in South
West Georgia and then North Mississippi.
ah He was working to support Black Southerners who were risking their lives to exercise their right to vote.
Larry, it's great to have you with us.
Great to have you join us.
David, thank you.
I have to say you and Jim are doing a wonderful service for the people of Mississippi with this podcast.
And uh it's a pleasure and an honor to be with you.
Thank you, thank you, it's great to have you with us.
I wanna get your story and your history, but I wanna start out with this.
As I said earlier, ah with the elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion, are we going back to segregation?
And you lived through that working with the organizers.
Tell us your thoughts.
Well, uh I've been thinking a lot about this and American history, at least uh since, let's say, Herbert Hoover, uh has always gone forward.
And then there's been reactionary pushback that pushes it back further than it went forward.
Then it comes forward again.
uh
For example, uh during the uh 30s, during the Depression, uh people got together and uh forced the government, forced their representatives to uh pass laws and regulations that
theoretically would prevent another Depression, but more importantly, gave them more rights than they had before the Depression.
The right to unionize, for example.
uh And the country kept going forward until late 40s and 50s when those in power said, well, you know, now the war is over.
We got to pay attention to what these people have done.
And uh they've cut into our profits with their rights.
We got to push back.
And they came up with McCarthyism.
uh They came up with a system that anybody
who was fighting for change, particularly at that time, equal rights uh was called a communist and dismissed.
The message was, well, these people really aren't for equality.
uh What they're doing is they're trying to get us under Russian control.
It was never explained why, but the pushback was anti-communism.
Similar to today.
I'm not saying actually that oh there was not real danger from Russia, but the powers that they used that to squash everything.
And David, let me interrupt you.
It's so much like today.
Attorney General Bondi says she has this Epstein list.
McCarthy said he had a list of all the communists and we had communists in Congress and the list was never produced.
Nobody ever heard of the list or saw it.
It's the same thing happening again.
That's right.
And I would say uh on this score, uh Trump is using anti-Semitism instead of communism.
uh You know, whatever you say, it's anti-Semitic.
uh There is real anti-Semitism just like there was real communism, but it's uh not appropriately, but to just squash everything.
uh so after...
uh
After the Depression up until the 50s, uh we gained a lot.
And then came McCarthy to push back.
Then uh came the Civil Rights Movement where people got together and pushed our society forward.
We won the Civil Rights Act.
We won the Voting Rights Act.
uh We won uh a real separation of church and state in our schools.
When I grew up,
I grew up in an 80 % Jewish high school.
And every day we had to get up and say the Lord's Prayer and recite 10 verses from the King James Version of the Bible, uh which we did, but uh that kind of thing was
eliminated.
uh
to a Catholic school and it wasn't that bad.
You should have seen what's funny on Jewish holidays.
Oh, I bet.
uh And we won DEI, uh we won a lot of protections.
And now comes the Trumpists and they say, man, look what the people have done.
We got to push back and we got to push them back even further than they were when they started fighting.
And remember this movement against people's rights didn't start with Trump.
uh One of the first organizations, a real right wing wing nuts, played the role that the Ku Klux Klan played, except that they were all in suits and ties, member of the John Birch
Society.
Yes.
And all the people today are the inheritors of the John Bircher Society.
I mean, really, they're all sons of Birchers.
You're right, they're SOBs.
Ha ha.
Just to back up a little bit, the voting rights of 65 was the landmark federal statute that prohibited racial discrimination in voting.
And that came right after the Civil Rights Act of 64.
So then you got into the...
with the student group to uh help uh African-Americans vote.
Tell us about that.
Well, all my life, I wanted to be an organizer.
I'm a very young kid.
That's really all I ever wanted to do.
I wanted to work to help society move forward to become more equitable, more equal.
My parents were active in this.
My father, I mean, we were...
lower middle class or poor growing up in Philadelphia, however you want to define that.
My father was a welder, construction worker, and my mother a hairdresser.
But they both were very involved in uh fighting for equality.
this was a time when, well, I grew up, when I say lower middle class or poor, was a Jewish community.
And this was the time when uh most of our grandparents, the people of my generation, didn't speak English.
And uh many of them in the old country uh had been fighters, had uh been trying to overthrow the Tzar and had to come here out of risking their lives staying over there.
My mother's family was like that.
uh Most of my people, uh my grandparents' generation, told us about the pogroms, uh that is the beatings that were laid on the Jewish community periodically by the authorities.
uh
a Russian immigration family.
Well, yes, I mean, at that time, most of Eastern Europe was Russia.
It was Poland, Lithuania, uh Ukraine.
When I say Russia, I'm talking about the map then.
You're talking, yes, you're talking about the Soviet Union.
You're talking, the Tsar, the Tsar.
And uh they came from a tradition of knowing that in order for us to advance, we couldn't do it alone.
We too small.
We had to work with other people.
And in this country, uh really the first other people that
people my grandparents' ran into uh were African Americans because they moved to the big cities.
uh African Americans moved to the big northern cities around the same time as my grandparents' generation moved from Russia to the big northern cities.
They met each other in the ghetto.
To my grandparents' generation, these were Americans.
You know, they spoke English.
They had been here untold generations.
uh They were Americans.
uh Through the view of my grandparents' generation, uh you know, we were Jewish immigrants.
Everybody else was different types of Americans.
You had your Italians, your Irish, blacks, Greeks.
It was all the same.
Except that, and when we said white,
What we meant was white Anglo-Saxon Americans.
the uh people leading the country, the Rockefellers type.
Nobody else considered themselves white.
As a matter of fact, if you asked any ethnic group, they would say the same thing.
There's been a lot of studies about how various ethnic groups became quote white.
Anyway, they formed alliances, my grandparents did, with African Americans in the ghetto.
uh
And there was something else too.
Go ahead to the 40s.
uh When I was growing up in the late 40s, and we were learning about the Holocaust.
Now, we knew that Jews had been discriminated against uh in Russia, uh the same kind of ways that African Americans were discriminated against here.
uh
couldn't work in certain jobs, you couldn't live, uh a certain place in Russia was the palace settlement.
uh You were highly segregated from the rest of society.
And we related to blacks having the same thing here in America.
But then we learned about the Holocaust.
And uh also at the same time, there was a tremendous wave of antisemitism.
I'm talking about the late 40s in the United States.
And we said, you know, we better become very conscious of uh fighting to make sure that things like that don't happen in America.
And the leading group that's fighting for the same thing are African-Americans.
uh So, you know, we uh had on the ground alliances.
uh When the civil rights movement came along,
There I was coming from a family that was very conscious of the things that I just said, joining with other people to protect our own rights and fight for our own rights.
uh We saw that at that time, Congress and the Senate, because of the seniority system, was being run by white uh
segregationists from the south.
And the reason it was was because of seniority.
And these people got elected again and again and again and became chair of this committee and chair of that committee and ran the country.
And they were taking away the rights that our parents had won in the New Deal.
Our parents following our grandparents became active, won the New Deal and all that means.
uh
Now it was our turn to protect what our parents had won.
And that took many forms, many forms.
But one form it took was answering the question, how do we uh take the whole country out of the hands of these white segregationists who are running the country?
The answer was the reason they got elected again and again.
was because many of their constituents, in some places, most of their constituents were not allowed to vote.
They were majority black uh constituencies and black people were not allowed to vote.
And we knew if uh black folks in the South were allowed to vote, they would vote these people out of office.
To quote Jim, these SOBs out of office.
uh
And so we joined the civil rights movement uh to fight for ourselves and to fight for the country.
uh For me, it wasn't even a question of thinking about it.
What happened, I was in uh college in Ohio and the chair at that time was named Chuck McDew happened to be a black Jewish guy, matter of
he came to my college, NAR college, actually to meet with his girlfriend.
He wasn't even want to make a speech.
And I joined them for lunch in the cafeteria and we got to talk and he said, why don't you come down, you know, become an organizer with us, meaning Southwest Georgia at the time.
And, uh, this is the kind of thing my folks did.
So I said, sure.
Next thing I knew.
I was being shot at in Boston, Georgia.
We arrested for trespassing.
And what it was, we parked our car, was three of us.
Jack Chatfield, who was deceased.
And uh well, there was three of us.
John O'Neill was the third.
He went on to form the Free Southern Theater.
we were doing voter rights canvassing, knocking on people's doors, talking to them about voting, registering to vote, getting to know them.
And we parked our car, one wheel, uh, on the uh parking lot of a general store.
And we're walking along the road, talking to folks.
Deputy Sheriff comes up, he arrested us for trespassing on that parking lot where one wheel of our car was on.
and he uh handcuffed us in the back.
It's different from being handcuffed in the front, I've learned.
Handcuffed in the back is, especially if you have to sit, is very painful because you have to lean back.
uh Anyway, that was my first experience.
Now, I have to say, if you were to ask most white people, uh most white students,
why they went south to work for the civil rights movement.
A lot, most would say that in their school, they were brought up to believe that we were the land of the free and the home of the brave and everybody was equal.
And then on television, they saw police chief Bull Connor in Birmingham turning fire hoses on people just
fighting for the right to vote and the dogs uh and the people would say that and we were shocked.
So we went south to uh help make real what we were taught in school.
I saw the same TV, but I was not shocked.
I understood that one of the basis is
of America, of our economic and social system, was segregation and discrimination.
And I expected the power structure to fight back when people got together to fight.
One of the differences I said before, every time people get together and fight, the country moves ahead and then there's reaction uh and
people are pushed back.
The difference is the motion forward are always people getting together and fighting for their own self-interest, their real self-interest.
The pushback is always led by those in power who lie to people uh and make them think that their self-interest is not what it really is.
uh They lie to them and make them feel that their self-interest is what the power structure says it is.
And that's the pushback.
And that's where we want to
is the power structure capitalism?
Well, it's defined in a lot of different ways.
There's a lot of pieces to it.
That's why I just use that term.
But I will say a good piece of it is the type of capitalism we have here.
Sweden, Finland, Canada, England, they all are capitalist countries.
But it's a different type of capitalism.
And, you know, that's a whole different story.
I don't want to get too far up in the, the sky.
uh And I think that's what's happening today.
The Trumpists have lied to people and said, you know, we are going to make America great again.
Well, what they mean is the fifties.
uh When the New Deal.
was really at a tight.
They're talking about making America great back when all the things that they are against today were real and on the ground.
And by the way, when I say history shows, that sounds very, uh
ephemeral, you know, that as if history was a thing into itself, there was a force called history.
There's not.
There's just people doing things.
And there's some sometimes there's a pattern of people doing things.
But if we don't consciously fight back today and get people together again, like they were in the 30s and 40s and like they were in the 60s, the type of fascism
that is being perpetrated will last.
There's no God-given order that if you don't fight back, history will change.
Okay, well, you say the people have to fight back.
We still have the ballot box.
We haven't lost that yet.
And in North Mississippi and here in Tupelo, in the 16th Legislative District, we just had elections.
In none of these elections, where there more than about 12 to 15 % of the
registered voters participating.
This fight back that occurred in the 50s came about with voters turning out and I don't want to necessarily say taking to the streets, but they did to emphasize their point.
How do we get voters back?
How do we get them engaged again?
How bad does this have to go?
Well, I'm going to say that I am not of the belief that the worst things get the angrier people get.
The fact is the worst things get the more people give up if they don't see an alternative, which is the danger under Trump.
uh I'm going to answer your question, but I'm going to digress a minute to my own uh my own experience.
And I'm going to lead back to your question about
What can we do today uh to encourage people to vote?
And why is it that so few do?
uh When the modern civil rights movement, let's say in the late 50s started, uh it started the way most movements start actually, from a group of uh idealistic people who see things
they don't like.
and take action as individuals.
We had the freedom rides where people uh from all over the country, led by the Congress of Racial Equality, uh got on buses and traveled in the South to show the country that the
South was not obeying federal law, the Interstate Commerce Commission law uh that said,
when you're traveling interstate, bus stops are like little uh patches of the federal government.
And you must obey federal law, not state law.
State law is at that time required by law segregation.
You would be breaking the law if a white walker were black, but not in bus stops.
uh So that was one thing.
uh Other folks, uh
namely, HBCU students, black college students, sat in at lunch counters saying that we want the right to buy a hamburger.
This is an individual thing.
And a lot of them, that's what it was about, was about a hamburger.
I'm digressing a little bit at the founding of SNCC, the main.
it made McDonald's.
It was before McDonald's.
Yeah.
The main speech was, it's about more than a hamburger.
uh Out of that group of people, the uh young black college students, not just HBCUs, historically black colleges and universities in the South, but also in the North.
uh
They were doing a lot of demonstrations and they were calling on Martin Luther King and SCLC, his group, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to help.
And SCLC got a little overwhelmed and they said is what we need to do is to coordinate all these activities.
And they called a meeting of people from across the South and across the country.
I say people, mean young Black students to figure out how to coordinate activities.
And from that meeting came the student nonviolent coordinating committee.
very quickly after it was founded.
uh students went to communities, uh mostly not where they were from, some where they were from, and started to talk to people in the communities, in Mississippi in particular.
What they heard was, know, uh we never go anywhere on buses, what do we care about?
bus stations and we can't afford a hamburger.
No use if we have the right to buy a hamburger if we can't afford one.
And the reason we are so oppressed is we don't have the right to vote.
If we elected people that really supported us, that looked like us, that had our interests at heart.
if we became part of the power structure, which was a term used then, things would change.
So very quickly, after SNCC was founded, about a year or so later, the emphasis went to voter rights.
uh
how should I say this?
Activation.
Everybody had the right to vote in the South, but they couldn't exercise it.
So the emphasis was on winning the right to exercise your right to vote.
think one of the, also one of the things that you've left out is that after the second world war, of course, the college rights, but the blacks gained, the veterans gained the
right to college educations.
And all of a sudden, by the late 1950s, we were beginning to have an educated black population.
that was prepared to do the things that you were talking about.
Well, that's true.
And a lot of the people in SNCC came from that background.
These were the most brilliant students in these HBCUs and their parents are the people that you're talking about.
But in the South, when I said that people went into communities and were told that what we want is the right to right to exercise their right to vote, those people
were also World War II veterans.
uh Most of them did not have a college education.
Many of them were sharecroppers.
uh A disproportionate number of them though owned their own little farms or little stores.
So they were uh in some ways uh protected from the uh violence.
that people trying to get the right to vote felt.
If you try to vote at that time, uh you could be beaten, you could be uh fired, well, you were fired if you're working for a white person, and most black people did.
You could have the mortgage pulled on your house, become homeless, or you could uh be killed.
Seven people from 1960 to 66,
seven leaders just in Mississippi and just in the voter rights movement were killed.
But the people that really led the movement were people that were veterans of World War II that had been fighting in their communities for years for the right to vote.
And those are the people that the SNCC people spoke to.
particularly Bob Moses, who was a SNCC leader, went around speaking to these folks.
And they said, we want help in our fight.
It's our fight and we've been fighting, but we need help in certain areas.
For one thing, we need help in getting the nation to understand what's happening down here.
uh We need help with just doing a lot of the routine work.
I mean, we all have jobs.
I'm a farmer.
I work in a store, I own a store.
And at that time you had to lick envelopes to get the message out.
And we don't have time to do this.
We want to concentrate on being leaders.
So what people in SNCC did was go to communities, live in them and help local people do what they've been doing all along, but lending skills and time
and connections that people didn't necessarily have.
At first, in Mississippi, all the people that came from SNCC were black because the leadership of SNCC felt it was just too dangerous for black and white people to live
together in Mississippi, to work together.
If you see a black and white person walking down the street, you were a target.
Now that was different.
in Southwest Georgia, which is why they sent me to Southwest Georgia first.
It was decided there, uh it wasn't as dangerous.
But when we came down from the North, particularly whites, we were caught outside agitators by the Eastlands.
Senator Eastland gave a speech about me in the Senate talking about that
I was this communist.
He didn't say Jewish, but he meant that.
And you could get that from the speech.
Outside agitator that our folks are happy here.
He said folks in the Senate, he was going around the state, say that word.
He said something else.
uh But it made it seem like me and people like me were leaders of the civil rights movement.
Just stern people up.
That absolutely was not true.
uh In fact, I could never understand what an outside agitator was.
For you weren't from Georgia.
You weren't from Georgia.
Well, that was an outsider.
But what's an agitator?
uh How do you agitate people to take action, to risk their lives, to risk getting beatings, unless from their own experience uh they felt oppressed?
We were helping people.
uh
fight for their own freedom.
As a matter of fact, going back to Roger Wicker, I met him a few years ago here in Holly Springs and I introduced myself and I said who I was.
And he said, you were one of those outside agitators.
And I said to him, I was an outsider, but you were the agitator, meaning his parents, you
You were the one agitating people, not me.
There was inside agitators.
There was no such thing as an outside agitator.
Well, while all of this was going on in the South, there was actually going on in the North with Adam Clayton Powell, right?
Yeah, well, that's true.
I want to get back to answering your question.
And I said all of this for a reason.
Fighting for the right to vote came from folks in the community.
uh They got together.
SNCC and other groups helped them.
We were not leaders, we were organizers.
And when I said I wanted to be an organizer growing up, that's what I meant.
Not being a leader.
An organizer helps people to lead.
Right.
you know, helps with the technical stuff, brings people together, helps build leaders.
uh Well, that's what SNCC was doing.
But the movement for the right to vote came from people that understood that they needed the right to vote in order to live, to live.
uh And the first round of voting
after that was won, the voting turnout was very high.
I'll give you another example in Mississippi.
During Reconstruction in 1866, maybe it was 1865, the first year that blacks got the right to vote, and I have the voting rolls.
from Marshall County from that century.
The voting percentage was fantastic, was very high.
Why?
Because in both cases, people knew that that right to vote came from their own fight.
They identified with that right to vote.
uh The people that were running for office at first were people like them.
They understood the right to vote not to be just one abstract right.
You know, I mean, nobody wants the right to vote just to vote.
It's a pain.
They understood that they themselves won the right to vote, that they were electing people like themselves to office, and that this would lead to a better society.
Now I'm going to answer your question.
That uh excitement, that enthusiasm, that feeling of involvement, that sure knowledge that I can vote because of what we did was lost, not 100%.
But I'll give you an example in Mississippi.
uh Over the years, maybe it started with the voting rights bill.
Remember what I'm talking about.
was before the Voting Rights Bill.
And we would have gotten the right to vote uh because the way the system was set up here in Mississippi was clearly racially uh divisive, was clearly uh discriminating against
black people because the system was you had to pass certain tests and the person that decided whether you passed or not was the registrar.
That's the only person.
And we had all sorts of statistics showing that the registrars had failed.
I'm making up this number because I don't know.
80 % of Black people and it passed 100 % of white people.
It just couldn't be.
uh The Voting Rights Act codified it.
But we also lost something in it being law.
And then the leadership just concentrating
on elections.
We lost the feeling of involvement from folks.
Each year, elections seemed further and further in the air, especially as people got elected that didn't represent the people that voted for them.
People could vote, but the people got elected weren't all that different from when they couldn't vote.
And that's because leadership no longer concentrated on organizing, on bringing people together, not just around the right to vote, but about everything.
Getting people together to fight for a better society in many ways and having candidates come from the movement, it got turned around.
Now candidates were seen as the leaders of the movement.
So Jim, that's my answer to your question.
Why is it?
that people by and large don't vote.
It's because they feel disconnected from the system.
It's because it's no longer their system.
I'll give you a counterexample.
Okay, Larry, let me interrupt you for just a second here, but hang on to that thought.
Earlier you were talking about Senator Eastland when he talked about you.
ah At that same time, he was speculating that then recent disappearance of Shermer, Cheney, and Goodman was a hoax.
And those were the three civil rights
activists that were murdered.
uh yeah, in his and go ahead.
Now go ahead.
Yeah, Larry, go ahead.
No, that's what led to that speech.
uh
One of my first, I'll talk to you the way it happened to me, the way I got involved in exactly what you're saying.
One of my first jobs for SNCC was to bring books from the North that were being donated by schools and churches that don't use these books, they're old books.
They were donating them to the freedom libraries that went
with freedom schools that were being set up in the summer of 1964 as part of building the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and winning the right to vote.
My job, and there was others too, was to carry these books from places in the north to places all around Mississippi.
And I was doing just that.
It was...
uh
I believe April of 64.
And myself and uh there was four other people.
I was the only white guy.
We were all arrested in Oxford, right down the road from Holly Springs.
We were arrested on the charge of, and this is the exact charge.
carrying printed material, advocating the overthrow of the government of the state of Mississippi.
my.
And it was one of the laws that the legislature passed when they got word that a bunch of volunteers were coming down to Mississippi.
So Sheriff Boyce Bratton, who stood about three foot nothing, stopped us.
mean, his gun was dragging along the dirt in his holster, stopped us.
We were hauling these books in a U-Haul.
which was foolish because I was driving a Lark, a Studebaker Lark, which was the last car was like a tin Lizzie, the last car to be hauling a U-Haul around, but that's what we were
doing.
He stopped.
He took a look in the U-Haul, saw books, went to a judge, got a search warrant based on what I just said.
It said,
I have reason to believe and do believe that they are carrying printed material, et cetera, et cetera.
uh And then he unloaded the U-Haul and he was absolutely right.
We were carrying books that threatened to overthrow the state of Mississippi.
For example, sets of the Bobsie Twins, Bobsie Twins mysteries, sets of Nancy Drew mysteries, Winnie the Pooh.
old dictionaries, old histories.
You know, these were books discarded by people that no longer use them.
But the reason I'm saying they were right is because the purpose of these books was to help uh African American kids learn to read.
And that really threatened the government of the state of Mississippi at that time.
So we were thrown in jail.
uh we were investigated by the State Sovereignty Commission, which was set up by the government to undermine the civil rights movement.
See, they're state sovereign.
But Mississippi didn't say, you know, we are denying people the right to vote.
They said, we're for states' rights.
And in this state, we do this and this.
So they set up the State Sovereignty Commission, not the commission to undermine equality.
But that's what it was.
And these uh investigators came and they uh took us one by one and they scared the crap out of us.
One of them said, we haven't hung us a hebe in a while.
What are you thinking at?
To me, look, I'm about to get lynched.
They kept us in there, were harassing us like that.
Then they let us go.
This was Oxford Mississippi Steel.
The home of Ole Miss.
In fact, I'm gonna digress a minute and I'll get back to my story.
When we left, Boyce Spratton said to me, if you ever come back into Lafayette County, we're gonna kill you.
Now, sheriffs said that to SNCC people in every county.
And always the end of the story is, well, you know, I went back anyway, not me.
I've been in the South for five years by that time.
And I took that very seriously.
And when a group of uh SNCC people were invited to speak at Ole Miss, uh I didn't go.
And I felt very bad, I'm just being a coward.
But the fact is when these students were coming back to Holly Springs, which was our uh headquarters,
Sheriff Bratton stopped them in the car, hauled them all out and said, where's Reuben?
Ha ha ha ha ha!
Hmm
what was their answer?
He's back at home, you think he's nuts?
You told him you were gonna kill him.
He's back in Lafayette County.
He's in Marshall County, he's not gonna come here.
know, we're only but so brave.
uh Anyway, but getting back to the story, and this leads back to Eastland, I'm going a long way around.
uh We got arrested again in Holly Springs, this time for something about travel, uh our trailer, I don't know.
And I noticed...
that somewhere either in Oxford or in Holly Springs, my address book had been stolen, had been ripped off.
I read later in the State Sovereignty Commission reports on us, which are now public, and you can get more online, that uh the State Sovereignty Commission stole it down there in
Oxford.
Okay, this is all in a...
Fast forward to the middle of July.
Senator Eastland had been going around the state saying that disappearance, this is before they found the bodies, the disappearance of the three civil rights workers uh was a hoax,
as you said.
uh And he said, they are voluntarily disappear and probably
laughing it up on Moscow gold in a New York hotel room.
So he got in, there are a bunch of Jewish communists, New York, Moscow, you you get it.
Then he said the same thing to the Senate, except not the same way.
He said, the people of Mississippi are very patient.
We think it's a hoax.
Nobody has proven it's not.
And I have evidence.
that the communists are leading the civil rights movement in Mississippi.
The implication is if the communists were leading it, then this must be a hoax.
You had to be there to get the logic.
But that was his message.
And that's why he gave a speech about me, that I was a leader being a communist.
The first thing I did is I went to the real leader of the
project here in the holidays.
I never said I was a leader.
You're a leader.
These are local people.
All the thing I said is I stuff envelopes for you.
You I do what you tell me to do.
I'm not a leader.
uh But anyway, that's a long way around getting to your question about what Eastland was doing.
By the way, uh we had some kids here.
whose parents worked for the FBI in the North.
And one was a congressman at that time from San Francisco who had worked for the FBI in the past.
And this is when everybody in Mississippi uh in charge of the police were floundering around, quote, looking for the bodies.
uh And they couldn't find them.
That's why they were free to say it's a hoax.
Mm-hmm.
these people called their parents, you know, that either worked for the FBI or had contacts and said, listen, they better stop floundering around because uh everybody's
starting to question, how come you can't find a body?
They're starting to question, is it a hoax?
Because the other side of not finding them is maybe they're dead.
The next week, the FBI quote, found the bodies.
As a matter of fact, uh
At that time, they were dredging the rivers of Mississippi and they kept popping up with bodies of young black people.
And they just coming up with too many bodies.
People would kill over the years.
There's a bunch of bodies.
They had to cut that out.
Um.
catching back up then, you know, and going into what Jim said about oh getting people motivated, getting people in action.
It appears from what my perception of what you're telling us is, then it's, it's by God, it's about time that we get involved and get the people motivated, show them that there is
a way.
to change and that their vote matters.
uh
Yes, but I want to be clear.
It's harder.
The fight is harder today than it was in the 60s because in the 60s we had laws protecting people.
And for example, in the 60s, murder was illegal.
It isn't today.
Sheriff Rainey and them in the Shoba County uh killed uh the civil rights workers and during the first trial of the guy that killed Mager Evers.
The murderers had to lie and say they didn't do it because murder was illegal.
Today, we have the standard ground laws.
uh We say, yes, we shot George Floyd, or we didn't shoot him, we choked him to death.
Yes, we shot this one and that one across the country because we thought they had guns.
We were threatened.
That's harder today uh to prosecute somebody for murder.
uh
Trump.
learned a lot from the McCarthy period when they used, you're a communist, uh to stop anybody from trying to make progress, particularly in fighting for integration.
uh McCarthy's lawyer, Roy Cohn, was Trump's lawyer up until he died.
And Roy Cohn taught Trump how to do it.
Call him a communist.
Don't answer what they're saying directly.
Call him losers.
Use ad hoc arguments.
Call him names.
But it's worse today because back then we had uh government units in place to protect people.
And we had a president starting with Kennedy uh who to a certain extent wanted civil rights and wanted to protect people.
Trump learned that.
Larry, it seems to me that.
my father's generation.
the World War II veterans.
uh
Ever since they came back, everybody wanted to have the next generation have it better than you had it.
Yes.
And I think it has gotten to the point that frankly, the present generation has gotten all too much.
None of them know what it is to not have a home to live in, to miss a meal, to have to go to war and put your life on the line.
And since it's so damn good or easy, they don't care.
They don't need to vote because I got everything I need.
Well, the question is, how do you change that?
oh Well, I'm about to give my opinion.
Good.
Let's hear it.
uh Trump learned from the McCarthy period.
And that's why he's dismantling the federal government, because the federal government protected people from McCarthy.
And the federal government uh gave people the rights, Jim, and the softer life that you're talking about.
uh And uh
drilled into them that they don't have to fight for it, that they can support.
But as I said, Trump learned from that.
So he's dismantling uh those protections that people had that defeated McCarthy in the courts, in various agencies.
The Department of Education, for example, he's dismantling that.
uh Workers' uh rights as far as health and safety rules, he's dismantling.
uh
He's doing that because he learned from McCarthy.
But on the other hand, there are still many, people around that learned from McCarthy period to learn how to fight back.
A lot of those leaders, unfortunately, didn't use what they learned.
And as I said before, they're just they just concentrated on winning office and not involving people.
But
As people today, as students today lose their Pell grants, uh find that there are fewer high paying jobs around, uh have rights taken away from them, which is the other side of
what Trump's doing.
We know how to have those people, the same people you're talking about, Jim, we know how to get people together and fight for their own rights.
Now that's different from saying the worst things get the better they get.
I'm saying the worst things get the more you have to fight and the harder it is to bring people together, but it can be done.
And it's the bringing people together that counts.
And even the type of people that you're talking about, I'm saying,
I would end your sentence by saying, up till now, up till now they were that way.
And that has to change.
But it doesn't happen automatically.
It doesn't happen by magic.
It happens by hard work.
I remember when I got out of high school, ah I had saved up enough money to buy a car and...
uh
My dad told me, he said something along the lines of, know why I'm making you buy it.
And I should probably know.
And he said, because if you don't have some skin in the game, you're not going to take care of the car.
And it seems to me that we've got now at least one and possibly two generations that don't have any skin in the game.
And it's about to come home and it's not going to be pretty.
Well, I was just reading an article the other day that said why the American dream is a fantasy today.
And they pointed out young people can no longer buy homes.
They can no longer buy cars.
They can no longer afford rent.
They can't afford to get married.
uh They just can't afford.
The American dream has been
placed out of people's reach that's going to catch up with the powers that be, and it's going to to catch up with the peop
But those are my those are our grandchildren.
That's the future of this country.
It could be, but uh it could be.
But the Talmud says it is not given to us to finish the work, nor is it given to us to ignore the work.
In other words, we just got to keep going.
Just got to keep moving along.
uh Or for sure, what's going to happen is going to be a fascist state.
It might become that even with our effort, but we know for absolute sure it's going to be there without the effort.
And we are well on that way there now.
Okay, we're about, our time is about up.
Jim, which.
enjoyed this.
Thank you for coming.
Thank you for your time and thank you for your work.
Yes.
And thank you both very much for having me on.
I really appreciate it.
Well, you're quite welcome.
And we would love to have you back.
And maybe the next topic would be, okay, let's get organized.
You know, it's today.
you doing any active work now?
Okay, so tell us how people can get in touch with you if they're interested in getting involved.
If you're interested in the fight to keep rural hospitals open, which is the main fight that I'm involved in now, contact me at LWRUBIN, LWRubin at aol.com.
We are starting a grassroots movement to protect rural hospitals.
That's part of the fight.
protect and expand Medicaid.
That is so important because if you live in certain parts of the Delta and have a heart attack, you're dead.
You can't get to a hospital.
true here in Marshall County.
That's lwrubin at aol.com.
Yes.
Come on listeners, it's Mississippi, it's our hospitals, it's our lives.
Let's get involved.
Take the step.
It's not gonna hurt.
It's only gonna help.
Absolutely.
And I also want to, uh the website for SNCC, ah just looked into it this morning.
It was just fascinating, the history of there.
And that is snccdigital.org.
uh So there's a lot of great stories, Larry's story is in it as well.
uh
We do want to thank our listeners.
We do want to thank our subscribers and also our sponsors.
And Jim, do it.
are not free.
ah We have half a dozen sponsors who contribute a little money each month.
And we need more sponsors.
So if any of you have a few nickels and dimes left, we could certainly ah use the funds to continue these podcasts.
They're educational.
ah and they're about Mississippi and that's where we live.
Thank you, David.
Yes, uh Once again, any questions, comments, suggestions, donations, uh please go to mshappeningsthenumber1.com.
And we do appreciate you.
Absolutely.
uh Cash App Venmo, PayPal, absolutely.
And as always, we do want to remind you, may we never become indifferent to the suffering of others.
Thank you.